


Times Fifty-Two

by Setcheti



Category: Fantastic Four (Movies 2005-2007), Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow (2004), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Gen, Light Angst, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-18
Updated: 2015-02-18
Packaged: 2018-03-13 13:48:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3383915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Setcheti/pseuds/Setcheti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It had been a week. And then it had been two, and then a little bit more than that. And all that time, the portal had stayed closed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Times Fifty-Two

**Author's Note:**

> This is a one-shot, one of the half-dozen or so fics I came up with featuring Reed and his portal generator. If someone wants to take it further, be my guest.

It had been a week. And then it had been two, and then a little bit more than that.

And all that time, the portal had stayed closed. Because Reed Richards’ portal-generating machine wouldn’t work and he and Tony Stark had been trying to fix it.

The machine had worked two and a half weeks previously, for just a few seconds. Just long enough to pull Steve Rogers out of Reed’s lab and into god-knows where in some alternate universe – Reed swore that his machine wouldn’t have been able to send Steve to another dimension, just to some other parallel universe in the greater multiverse. A nearer rather than a farther point, even, meaning that whatever universe he was in was at least relatively close to their own.

Which wasn’t a whole lot of consolation to his worried teammates, who were all smart enough to realize just how different – not to mention dangerous – even a small change could make things.

But now, finally, after two and a half weeks, the machine looked like it might be ready to work again. Tony had been frantically calculating trajectories since the night before, using readings gleaned from the accident and from the tests done before it had happened; he compared it to tracking a ping-pong ball through a room full of trampolines. Clint Barton and Ben Grimm had pitched in to help him; they were both pilots, so trajectories were something they knew how to work with. And between the three of them, by about four a.m. they had the range of locations they needed to check narrowed down from infinite to reasonably searchable.

Then at eight a.m., Dr. Doom attacked from just off Staten Island. To say he was surprised when almost every superhero in the city attacked back in full fury was an understatement. He ended up triggering his fail-safe escape plan early and running back to Latveria in real fear for his life – and in real fear that they would follow him.

He had no way of knowing that following him had been the last thing on any of their minds. No one ever told him, either.

 

At 10:40 a.m., they were as ready as they were ever going to get. Reed turned on the machine and it started to hum, and a pinprick of light appeared over the spot they had marked on the floor – and which everyone was standing well back from, because it was the exact spot Steve had disappeared from. The hum became a whine became a high-pitched tearing moan like a piece of metal being ripped in half…and then there was a popping noise and the portal appeared, quivering around the edges but, thankfully, holding itself open.

Reed aimed his bio-scanning ray – tweaked by Tony and calibrated by Bruce – into the portal…and shook his head. “Not this one.”

They went on to the next. And the next, and on and on and on. Twenty-seven portals later, however – including one which had opened into a jungle and accidentally netted them a very pretty parrot-like bird with a beak full of reptilian teeth – the scanner sounded the alarm that indicated a found match. The other side of the portal was mostly in darkness, lighted only by the anemic flickering of broken emergency lights behind ragged sheets of smoke. And right in front of it was a squat, cobbled-together looking piece of machinery with a blinking blue light on the front. There was a sign next to the machine; it said “YOU’RE IN THE RIGHT PLACE” in black-painted block letters with a crude depiction of Steve’s shield in red and blue beside them, and scrawled messily underneath that, “Danger!! Stay there, we’ll come to you.”

The Avengers and the Fantastic Four looked at each other. “We?” Bruce questioned softly.

“No idea.” Reed frowned, taking more readings. “I’m locking this one in, so if the portal disconnects we can go right back to it. I’m not sure how long it will stay open.”

Tony had been staring at the machine with its blinking blue light. “I think that’s a beacon,” he said slowly. “One triggered by the portal opening – that thing below the blue bulb? That’s a sensor.” He frowned, squatting so he could get a better look at the machine, being careful not to get too close to the watery surface of the portal. “It’s a fairly crude one, my guess would be this place is behind us technologically.”

“Or whoever made the beacon only had access to old tech,” Bruce pointed out. “Not to mention, Steve couldn’t have been the one who built that – he’s got a lot of skills, but making something like that isn’t one of them.”

“True.” Tony looked for a moment more, then stood back up. “So whoever he’s with knows how he got there, believed him when he told them how he got there, and they’re smart enough to detect the portal reopening – and to pinpoint exactly where it would happen.”

“But they obviously couldn’t open a portal themselves,” Reed agreed, still focused on his readings. “Which would again suggest that they aren’t as advanced as we are…”

“That could have been a power issue,” Bruce countered, waving a hand at the scene beyond the portal, behind the sign. “Something bad happened over there, guys, or possibly something bad has been happening over there and still is. Maybe a war, some kind of attack…”

“Which would hopefully mean we’re lookin’ at the good guys’ hideout, or their base, whatever,” Clint chimed in. “Cap wouldn’t voluntarily be anywhere else, and if he was there involuntarily he wouldn’t have told them where he was from – or what his shield looked like.”

“He could be misleading the bad guys to get their help…” Johnny Storm began, and then stopped when almost everyone in the room raised an eyebrow at him. “Okay, yeah, that isn’t gonna happen – he really can’t play the bad guy, can he?”

“No,” Natasha said. “Not convincingly, anyway.” She almost smiled. “Although it is amusing to watch him try.”

In the distance on the other side of the portal, a popping noise sounded. “That was gunfire,” Clint observed, tensing. “Automatic weapons, by the sound of it.”

More popping…and then a distant boom that made everything on the other side of the portal shake. And then another. Tony’s eyes went wide. “That sounds like they’re being shelled.”

One more boom, and suddenly the popping sounds were closer…and so were yelling voices. Somewhere out of view something was being banged on, then there was a crash and some cursing and an unfamiliar voice called out, “The portal, it’s open!”

“Thank God.” That had been Steve, and a moment later he dashed into view and gave the younger man with him a shove. “Jump through! Now! Joe, get over here, we’re out of time!”

One more man appeared, dragging a bedraggled blonde woman by the arm, and they all dove through the portal in time to an even larger boom that knocked the beacon over. “DEX!” Steve and the other man yelled at the same time.

The younger man was aiming something back through the portal, and when the other side exploded something stopped it from doing more than just bulging in their direction. Reed hastily shut down the portal at that point, and Steve visibly wilted with relief from where he was sprawled on the floor. “That was too close.”

“Yes, quite,” the other man said from an identical position, and in a distinctly British accent. He was wearing a leather bomber jacket over a button-down shirt and khakis; he looked like a refugee from a World War II movie. “Dex, are you all right?”

The younger man nodded, cradling the piece of equipment in his arms like a teddy bear. “I’m glad the force-shield worked.” In contrast to the pilot, he sounded very American; he was possibly even a New Yorker like Steve.

“So are we – and I’m pretty sure everyone else is too.” Steve pushed himself to a sitting position with a groan. He was dressed like the British man was, and his hair was shorter than it had been when he’d left – he looked a lot more like his old WWII photographs than he normally did. He patted the younger man on the shoulder. “Good job, Dex.”

“Excellent job, as usual,” the British man agreed, sitting up himself. He looked around at the staring faces, and quirked a smile. “I can only hope that you’re the friends Captain Rogers has talked so much about.”

“They are.” Steve pointed. “Joe, Dex, meet Tony, Bruce, Clint, Natasha, Johnny, Sue, Ben…and Dr. Richards, the guy who stranded me over there in hell in the first place.”

Reed’s eyes widened and Johnny smirked, raising an eyebrow. “Let me guess, it was a war zone?”

Steve snorted. “One better, it was a war zone with Nazis. Luckily Joe and his guys were the ones who found me, I’ve been working with them ever since.” This time he was the one who raised an eyebrow – at Reed. “I’m guessing either you have a damned good reason for not being able to rebuild the machine or it’s been a war zone over here too so you haven’t had a chance. Which is it?”

“Nothing’s attacked while you were gone except Dr. Doom, which happened this morning and we kicked his ass,” Tony said before Reed could. “In fact, I kind of had fun kicking his ass because it was so easy. Pity he probably won’t be back for a while.” He grinned. “Long few weeks?”

He was not prepared for all of the lurking good-humor to drain out of Steve’s expression like a plug had been pulled, or for Joe to wince, or for Dex to put a comforting hand on the supersoldier’s shoulder. “We knew it might happen like that,” he said gently.

“Yeah, I know. It’s just…I’d hoped it wouldn’t.” He took a deep breath. “How long was I gone on this end?” he asked quietly.

Clint found his voice first. “Two and a half weeks.”

Steve nodded. “Okay.”

Reed, never good at reading silences – or for that matter, other people – of course asked the question no one else wanted to touch. “How long were you there?”

Steve’s jaw set. “It doesn’t matter.”

“But, if the time difference…”

“It doesn’t matter. It was only a few weeks here, nothing has…” his voice didn’t quite break. “Nothing has changed.” He rolled to his feet, the other two men standing up as well and pulling the blonde woman up with them. Steve waved a hand at the older man. “This is Captain Joe Sullivan, code name Sky Captain – basically, where we just came from, he was me. And this,” his hand found the younger man’s shoulder again and squeezed, “is Dex Dearborn, who’s the same kind of genius Tony is but a hell of a lot less annoying.”

“Hey!” Steve cocked an eyebrow, and Tony gave in. “I’m not that annoying…all the time,” he muttered.

The blonde woman chose that moment to look up from straightening her dress, pushing her hair back away from her face, and when Tony gasped Steve shook his head. “She’s not Pepper, Tony. She’s _nothing_ like Pepper.”

“But…”

“Trust me, this woman absolutely cannot be anything like the woman you know,” Joe interrupted, dusting himself off. “We were only dragging her along because there was no place to leave her where she wouldn’t do even more damage,” he spat.

It looked like Dex wanted to say something about that, but Steve’s hand on his shoulder, a frown and a quick headshake made him duck his head and hold his tongue. The blonde woman cleared her throat, obviously unhappy at being left out of the introductions a second time, and Steve turned a glare on her that made her cringe – which shocked the other Avengers and the Fantastic Four. “This,” he made it sound like he was talking about a thing, not a person, “is Polly Perkins, and she’s a reporter – the kind who gives the profession a bad name.”

Polly stamped her foot. “That isn’t…” His glare intensified, but this time she snarled back. “Aren’t you worried about what your friends will think of this…ungentlemanly behavior, _Captain_?”

She’d made the title sound like a slur, and Steve’s blue eyes went flinty. So did Joe’s. “It would take better men than either of us are to be gentlemen towards a conniving, mercenary bitch,” he said in a measured voice, and she went pale. “Believe me, if we could see you charged here, we’d do it.”

“Charged?” Ben rumbled. “Charged with what?”

“Treason,” Joe replied crisply. “The devastation you saw on the other side of the portal used to be the Flying Legion’s base of operations.”

“Now it’s a mass grave,” Steve added. “Hardly any survivors – although we did make sure there were no prisoners.” He saw the looks. “Nazis, everyone, I already said that. The second World War never happened in their world the way it did here, Germany kept to itself after the first war and started expanding more slowly, rebuilt itself as a technological superpower.”

“We formed the Legion to combat them, and others who tried to step into the vacuum of power the war left.” Joe said, shaking his head. “There were a lot of them, we stayed busy.”

“The Legion was independent of any country, but they worked for the Allied cause,” Steve continued. “Something we should probably put some thought into ourselves – global responsibility instead of local or national.”

Tony cleared his throat. “SHIELD…” Steve gave him a look; so did Bruce, and he sighed. “Okay, yeah, you’re right. SHIELD looks after its own agenda first, everything else second.”

“Maybe even third or fourth,” Ben rumbled, shaking his head. He cocked a rocky eyebrow at Steve and Joe. “How many’d they get, because of her?”

“Just at our base, nearly two hundred,” Joe told him. “The attacks on the mainland United States, because the Legion wasn’t there to stop them…well, New York is gone, Washington too. I’m not sure how the others fared, we lost most of our communications with them after Washington went down.”

“Really.” Clint was eyeing the woman who looked like a younger, harder version of Pepper Potts appraisingly. She shrank back from him – or would have, if Joe had let her. “How much damage could she do here?”

Steve and Joe looked at each other, and after a long moment Joe raised an eyebrow and Steve nodded slowly. “Not much, really,” he said. “As long as we can protect Dex, she can’t tell them anything about Joe or I that would make much of a difference.”

Dex protested that. “She wouldn’t…”

“She would, kid,” Clint contradicted him, albeit gently. “She would, I know the type.”

“As do I,” Natasha added. “She will only hold back information until she perceives that releasing it will be of benefit to her.”

“Which it wouldn’t have done at all when it came to Dex…back home,” Joe confirmed. “Everyone already knew about what he could do, and they knew he could not only protect himself but he was protected by all of us as well.”

Tony recovered himself. “He’ll be protected here too,” he said and, surprisingly, nodded to Reed. “Between the two of us, we’ve got connections and resources out the wazoo.” He looked at the astonished young man. “You built the portal detecting gizmo too?”

“Out of what I could scavenge from the base,” Dex confirmed. He hugged his shield generator a little tighter. “I…getting back here, to where Steve was from, was our only hope. We didn’t have any place else to run after the Royal Navy’s flying aircraft carrier went down.”

“Dex helped design that, too,” Joe said quietly. “It was a wonder, a flying fortress and air base. A…very good friend of ours was in command of it.”

“We’ve got a thing like that – or at least, SHIELD does,” Clint said, mostly to Dex. “They call it a helicarrier. It spends a lot of time in the water, though, it’s too expensive to keep it in the air very often.”

The younger man cocked his head, frowning thoughtfully, his grip on the generator loosening again. “Is the problem weight or fuel?”

Clint shrugged. “Probably both together. I know Tony’s got specs on it back at the Tower, you can take a look when we go back over there.”

“Take them now,” Natasha said. “I will put the woman into custody at SHIELD headquarters, but Steve’s friends should be in the most protected area possible. The Tower is the most secure place in the city.”

“It is,” Tony agreed. “Clint, you and Steve head back home and get everyone settled, Bruce and I will be back over there just as soon as we’ve made sure Reed’s portal generator is taken care of.”

“Good thinkin’,” Clint agreed. Natasha immediately moved to take possession of Polly, who looked like she was going to resist, and the archer grinned at her. “Lady, you don’t want to do that,” he warned, sounding amused. “Just go along quietly and you won’t get hurt. By Nat, anyway.”

Polly raised an eyebrow at him, then looked Natasha up and down and sniffed. “Do all women here dress so immodestly? I only knew of one in our world who did…but I wouldn’t exactly have called her a lady.”

If Steve and Joe hadn’t caught Dex, he might have actually dropped his shield generator and gone for the shocked woman’s throat. “Frankie was ten times the woman you’ve ever dreamed of being,” Joe told her coldly. He nodded at Natasha. “Take it as a compliment. She was an amazing woman, and a better commander than any man I’ve ever known – myself included.”

Natasha nodded. “I would enjoy hearing more about her,” she told him, and with one swift movement grasped Polly’s arm and pulled her away from Joe, making the blonde woman stumble on her high-heeled pumps. “You chose to wear those in a war zone, yet you cannot keep your balance in them,” she observed, ignoring the glare Polly shot at her and turning her leg to display the equally high but infinitely more sturdy heels on the boots she herself was wearing. “You will find that women here do not consider putting themselves into positions where men will feel obligated to ‘save’ them to be acceptable. Although men do exist here who will use that tactic against you. I will be happy to introduce you to some of them.”

She exchanged a look with Clint, who made a show of holding the door open for her so she could drag the now highly offended Polly away. “Are we sure she’s not just gonna throw her down the stairs? Really?” Tony asked nobody in particular.

Clint shook his head. “Nat doesn’t throw people down the stairs, she says the fun’s over too fast that way,” he quipped. “I can guarantee you they’ll walk down ‘em instead of taking the elevator, though – and across every sidewalk grate between here and where the car’s parked, too.” He listened, then held open the door again and waved Steve towards it. “We’re takin’ the elevator, and we’ll flag down a cab. Dex, you want to leave your gear here with Tony so no one asks questions? He and Bruce can bring it back in his car, it’ll be perfectly safe.”

Dex looked a question at Steve, who nodded, and then he handed the shield generator over to Tony like a mother handing over a newborn; the fact that Tony accepted the generator the same way seemed to reassure him. “Don’t let anyone hit the yellow button, that’s the self-destruct,” he cautioned. “I could probably build another one, but someone might get hurt when it blew up.”

“I have to give people that warning all the time,” was Tony’s just barely sarcastic reply. “They tend to hold it against me, though.”

“When you see how often his work catches on fire, you’ll understand,” Bruce told Dex. “Maybe you can help him with that.”

“Don’t bet on it,” Joe told Bruce, clapping Dex on the shoulder. “Well, let’s be off. I’m interested to see how the city is different.”

“Tell the cabbie take the scenic route,” Tony told Clint. “Use the Jarvis card.”

“Planned to anyway,” Clint responded with a wink. “Come on, boys, we’re goin’ to Brooklyn.”

Steve rolled his eyes but went through the door after Clint, and Joe followed with his hand still on Dex’s shoulder. At the last second, though, Dex glanced back at Reed, mouthing something, and then they were gone.

Reed sat down heavily, shaking his head when everyone looked at him. “Times fifty-two,” he said quietly, and then dropped his face into his hands.

Tony swallowed hard, exchanging a worried look with Bruce. “Years instead of weeks. He was there for two and a half years, their time.”

Johnny and Ben looked at each other, grimacing. “Crap.”

“That Mr. Fantastic here stepped in,” Tony agreed.

“I think…this Legion idea may be the way to go, and the sooner we start workin’ on it the better,” came from Ben. The others looked at him, startled by the apparent non-sequitur, and he shrugged. “Last week Clint said Fury was askin’ questions about where Cap was, like he though the Avengers were hidin’ somethin’ from him. And Natasha hustled that little Pepper look-alike out of here like her tail feathers were on fire just now. Why the rush? And why hand her over to Fury when we know she’ll eventually tell him all about Mini-Stark and his steampunk helicarrier and his scrap-metal portal detector and shield generator?”

“Because they need to throw him a bone,” Tony said, swallowing again. “He’s…crap, he must have been making noises about needing to find out what was going on. And she and Clint have been antsy lately, for the past month or so. Maybe he’s been making those noises for a while now.”

“Ten to one she’ll tell him Steve _went_ over there, on purpose,” Ben put in. “She won’t say the whole thing was an accident, just that we had trouble gettin’ him back.”

“Steve is a tactical thinker, he always deals with what he sees as the immediate problem first,” Bruce agreed. “Natasha knows that. So when he tossed it out there…”

“She ran with it,” Ben said. “Which means he knew somethin’ was wrong before he got sucked into the portal – and she must not’ve thought there was an alternative to handin’ that reporter over, or she wouldn’t be doin’ it. Avengers Tower may be the safest place around, but it’s not impenetrable. The minute that reporter bitch tells Fury about the kid, SHIELD’s gonna be wantin’ him. And we can’t trust the government to tell SHIELD to back off, ‘cause they run hot and cold between thinkin’ we’re great and thinkin’ we’re terrible…and right at the moment we ain’t exactly on anyone’s Christmas list. But if we can convince the U.N…”

“Guys like Doom are a global threat,” Johnny agreed slowly. “Not to mention, when bad guys show up just to come after us…”

“If we weren’t here, if we had a base of operations somewhere else, then civilian casualties and damages would be minimized,” Reed agreed. “And we would have more freedom to protect ourselves as well. I have security systems I haven’t been able to put in place because the law says I can’t use them in the city.”

Tony was nodding too. “Ditto,” he said. “They won’t let me use my generator either, even though it’s perfectly safe, because of Loki attacking the city to get to it. So maybe if we…I don’t know, bought an island? Or built one? Power wouldn’t be an issue, neither would transportation as long as we weren’t too far out.”

“And public and political sentiment being where it is right now, nobody would be sad to see us go,” Bruce added. “We could also pool our resources that way, something SHIELD and the government have been doing their best to stop us from doing.” He smiled. “And Captain Sullivan is British, so that will hopefully give us an in with the UK.”

“I still have some contacts,” Sue said, sitting down next to her husband and putting her arm around his shoulders. “I’ll see what I can arrange for us. Say, in a month?”

“We could probably have something put together in a month,” Tony agreed. “I’m going to sit that kid down in a lab and introduce him to Jarvis, my guess is that with almost unlimited resources and modern tech he’s going to come up with things that’ll blow everyone’s mind.”

“Yeah, because he built a force-shield generator, a portable one, out of scraps he scavenged in the ruins of his 1940s-era base,” Bruce said. “Kind of like someone else we know, making impossible scientific advances out of whatever junk is lying around.”

Tony batted his eyelashes at him. “You say the sweetest things. And they’re all true, but I’ll still reward you when we get home.”

Ben rolled his eyes. “Save the sap to traumatize your own team with,” he grumbled. Tony and Bruce being…together was old news, at least within the relatively small superhero community, but that didn’t mean he wanted to watch it in action. He was frustrated enough as it was. “So, the portal generator?”

“Is coming with us,” Bruce said, and raised an eyebrow when Reed started to object – not that he would have gotten much objecting done anyway, since his wife had clapped her hand over his mouth. “It’ll be safe, don’t worry – it could turn out to be really useful, in fact. But I think we need to build a special room for it, with some specific safeguards, and you don’t have space for that.”

Reed breathed a visible sigh of relief, and Sue let him have the use of his mouth back again. “So you’re not going to destroy it?”

“We’re mad, not stupid,” Tony told him. “I think all of us would feel better knowing it was somewhere safe and that place isn’t here, yes,” he said, quickly following up with, “and that isn’t entirely your fault, accidents happen when you’re playing with new tech. But Reed,” he waved his hand at the room, “dude, this is basically your living room, you had the thing sitting in a corner like a potted plant. You do not have the proper facilities to run these kinds of tests and you know it – and Steve paid the price this time, and even though it apparently worked out pretty well for some other people…well, it was avoidable, that’s all I’m saying. So let’s avoid it. Not to mention, I can put it somewhere where we can all get to it if we have to run to a parallel universe, and you’d better believe I’m gonna have that kid working with me on all the things we’d need to make that a feasible escape plan.”

“Not to mention, within six months we’ll all be living together one way or another anyway,” Bruce added with a shrug. “The minute we start to move in the direction of pooling our resources and splitting from SHIELD, it’s gonna hit the fan – we won’t have a year, I guarantee it. The faster we can get in front of the Secretary General with a proposal, the safer we’re going to be – but we’re still not going to be safe until we’ve cut all ties and _made_ ourselves safe.”

“Do you think we have a month?” Johnny wanted to know.

“I think I know of some islands we could pick from,” was the reply. “Because I’ve been to them.”

“And if we can calibrate the portal generator correctly, we could investigate them without anyone being the wiser,” Reed agreed, nodding. “I’ll start working on the calculations as soon as you can get me the coordinates.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, it was his wife who asked the obvious question first. “What if we end up on one of Bruce’s islands in a parallel universe?”

“Then we’ll be even safer,” Ben told her. “Because we can hop sideways to the same spot in this universe whenever we want to, but no one would be able to follow us home.”

Tony nodded. “Yeah, that would work – and we’ll work on it. Want to carry the portal generator down in the freight elevator, Ben, while I carry the kid’s shield generator and Bruce gets the tools? We should get this stuff back to the Tower, and I’ll let Jarvis know we need to up the security protocols without looking like we’re upping the security protocols – he can close the back door Fury uses to sneak into my penthouse at the same time.”

Ben was agreeing to that when Johnny interrupted. “I think you’re all forgetting something pretty important,” he said quietly. Everyone stared at him. “Geez, really? You know it’s bad when _I_ have to be the voice of Jiminy Cricket for this group. ‘Times fifty-two’ ring any bells, anyone? The one guy who really didn’t need to lose any more time got sucked through the portal into a parallel universe for two and a half years and then brought back two and a half weeks later. You all saw the look on his face when he first realized how big the difference had been, even though he did try to downplay it.” His jaw set. “We owe him.”

“We do – _I_ do,” Reed agreed, looking pained. “But how…”

“You can’t,” Bruce said, and it wasn’t just Reed who winced. “No, I’m not trying to be an asshole, really…but like Johnny just said, because it’s Steve, you can’t. Since it is Steve, though, and he does know it was an accident, letting him know you’re sorry it happened will be enough.”

“And making sure it doesn’t happen again,” Tony chimed in, waving his hand at the portal generator in the corner, which Ben had trundled over to pick up. “Got a good start on that one already.”

“Are we taking the parrot?” Bruce wanted to know, pointing. The brightly-colored bird had waddled out of the kitchen and was currently crouched on top of a table, gnawing on what looked like a stainless steel serving spoon. The bird was nearly two feet long from tufted crown to scaled and feathered tail, and its little teeth were serrated – the inside of its ‘beak’ looked disturbingly like the mouth of an alligator. “I really don’t want to take the parrot right now if we don’t have to.”

“I like the parrot, he’s stayin’,” Ben told him. “Ain’t like he can hurt me. I’ll build him a cage, maybe I can train him or somethin’.”

Tony looked at the bird, which blinked back at him with one beady black eye and bit the spoon in half. He shuddered. “Good luck with that, really.”


End file.
